


Last Day, Yolk, Summer

by seapotato



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: #summerboiz, Feelings, Footsie, M/M, Prompt writing, aesthetic, ambiguous season 5, bad but good flirting, canon level excessive touching, low stakes augury, merlin's cheekbones, pushing the nature agenda, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-23 11:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23743675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seapotato/pseuds/seapotato
Summary: It was the last truly warm day of summer and Arthur was using every hunting, scouting, and sneaking trick he knew to slip through Camelot's forest unseen and unheard.
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 177





	Last Day, Yolk, Summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rinja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rinja/gifts).



> Prompt writing with Rinja; the intended 20 minutes spiraled into an hour, of course. Continuing my habit of folding in aspects of Once and Future King, aka merlin+arthur+nature. Ugh, I just miss them and also going outside.

Merlin had been acting strange today, stranger than usual. He'd taken long enough bringing Arthur breakfast that Arthur grew so irritated he stormed down to the kitchens himself only to find Merlin in an open pantry looming over a bowl with a stricken expression.

“What the hell are you doing?” Arthur had demanded, looking over his shoulder to see eggs in the bowl. The rich golden yolks were shot through with an alarming amount of red.

“Merlin,” Arthur said, “Toss those to the pigs and get my breakfast. Stop staring at it.”

But Merlin shook his head, distracted, and said, “It's a double yolk,” as if that were a harbinger of doom. Arthur grabbed the bowl and dumped it into the scraps bucket for feed.

“ _Now_ ,” he said, and Merlin didn't stop looking any less upset but he did bring Arthur breakfast ten minutes later. After Merlin had been excused, Arthur had overhead him talking to Gaius in the hallway on the way to the council chambers.

“An augury?” Gaius had asked, sounding alarmed.

“Yes. I mean, I think so. I'm not sure, I didn't do it on purpose!”

And then Goffrey had swept up next to him and Arthur focused on his real plan for the day, which was getting out of here as soon as possible.

It was the last truly warm day of summer and Arthur was using every hunting, scouting, and sneaking trick he knew to slip through Camelot's forest unseen and unheard. He'd managed to shake off three councilors all demanding he read through their lengthy treatises; escaped a meeting about grain tariffs; solved a completely inconsequential argument over a minor fief between the man hired to farm the land and the irresponsible son who had inherited it; blessed four newborn babies that he suspected Percival let in; and, finally, after setting the knights up for a brutal round of archery practice under Elyan's painfully perfectionist watch, he could be—

 _Here_. At a creek flush with summer rainstorms, dappled with maple and oak shadows, willow boughs dragging lazily across the surface. He paused to take it all in, the air heady with heat and color, the buzz of insects and the murmur of the water.

He toed off his boots, rolled up his trousers, and sank his feet into the soft warm mud of the bank. When he stepped into the shallows of the creek, the cold running water immediately made his ankles ache for a moment. Then it was all cool relief. He squished the mud between his toes, reveled in the mix of gritty sand and little sharp pebbles. He closed his eyes and just breathed.

Arthur loved the people of Camelot, the castle and its cloisters and towers, the villages, the farms, the promise of a good harvest, of a good hunt, the stories told on winter nights gathered around the Great Hall's fireplace, the candles everyone lit on Samhain.

But what he loved above all else, what he held closest to his heart, was the land. The creek breathed cool and clean above the surface and he thought about the rains and mountain snowmelt that fed it, the trees that drank from it; he thought about how the water ducked underground several miles away before resurfacing as a larger river, rushed all the way to the sea. Here he was connected to all of Camelot—its mountains and caves, its land and sky. The sunlight on his hair was a cradling palm mirrored by the soft mud below his feet. He would take care of her, and she would take care of him.

He moved further into the water, calf deep, small fish flashing as they darted away, close, away again. If he reached down to tip over the stones, crayfish would scuttle away. The creek was too shallow to swim but if he walked further down, around a bend and screen of trees, there was a dip in the topography that made a pool of water he could wade in.

He made his way there and nearly yelped when he saw someone else squatting on the large flat boulder that rose just above the surface of the water. It was _Merlin_ of all people, with his back to Arthur—Merlin whom he was very sure he left _at the castle_ in that horrible grain tariffs meeting because Merlin not only apparently cared about the tariffs, he also was actually intelligent about them.

Lounging on a rock in _Arthur's spot_ was definitely slacking off. Arthur knew it was slacking off because he himself was doing it. That was the whole point. But Merlin shouldn't be! No matter how the light caught his hair, auburn highlights playing through, with dust motes and pollen sifting lazily about him. Or the way that his knobbly bare knees—trousers rolled up like Arthur, knees barely visible on either side of his narrow frame—tugged at Arthur, made his chest ache.

He was about to call out to him, surely to reprimand, when Merlin waved his arms about and he realized he was...talking to himself? To someone? His head was titled down and Arthur could just hear the lilt of his voice over the splashing of the water. The line of his back was tense, but then his shoulders shook and his laugh carried out across the creek, melodic, wrapped around the trees and grasses along the bank. There was no way Arthur could think to describe it other than it sounded like—like everything around them, birdsong tumbling with river chatter, sun-bright mornings and moon-cool evenings, something from a different realm. He'd never heard him laugh like that before. He'd never made him laugh like that. He realized with a start he felt jealous, which—what the hell, was Merlin talking to an _otter_?

Arthur stepped forward and immediately slipped on an algae-slick stone, landing messily half underwater. He scrambled up as quickly as he'd fallen, his ribs a little sore, nearly all of him drenched, Merlin shuffling quickly towards him calling, “Arthur?! What! Arthur!” in a panicked voice.

Arthur shook his head to clear the water from his ears and then Merlin was there, sinking his stupidly long fingers into Arthur's hair, pressing lightly against the back of his skull, roaming to the sides and sweeping across the top. Arthur had observed on a disturbing number of occasions that Merlin's hands were actually quite clever but he didn't need the—the distraction right now, when he was still a little disoriented from falling.

“No blood, does this hurt at all?” Merlin asked as he prodded some more until Arthur batted his hands away.

“I'm fine, I didn't hit my head, no thanks to you,” Arthur said, knowing that last part didn't really make sense.

Merlin took a step back and Arthur took stock. He was mostly fine. Slightly mortified. His face might be red. He could blame it on the sun, on the cold water. Then he remembered why he was here, which was that no one else was not supposed to be here at all.

He narrowed his eyes at Merlin. “You're supposed to be back at the castle. Grain tariffs.”

Merlin had the audacity to raise an eyebrow at him and give him a sly grin. His cheekbones were ludicrous.

“Oh, shut up,” Arthur said.

“I didn't say anything!”

“You were thinking something, and loud enough that you may as well have. I'm king, I can be on my own damn land in my own damn river,” Arthur said as he pushed past Merlin and sloshed towards the rock Merlin had been sitting on. Arthur's rock.

Merlin waded after him. “Don't worry, I didn't skip out on the meeting. We broke early after yours truly pointed out that someone had switched their surplus metric to _volume_ instead of weight.” Merlin sounded truly disgusted and Arthur didn't feel the least bit bad for leaving him there.

When they reached the rock Merlin did a weird side-step in front of him blocking his view. “Do you really want to sit here? Why not take a rest on the bank, I'm sure you're tired from a long morning of...being king.”

Arthur looked at him and abruptly recalled why he had slipped in the first place. “Who were you talking to?”

“...You?” Merlin said, sounding genuinely confused.

“Not _me_ ,” Arthur said, “Before, on the rock.”

“Oh! Nothing. I mean no one.” Merlin did an awful job trying to look nonchalant.

“You were talking to an otter,” Arthur said flatly.

“No I wasn't”

“Yes, you were.”

“You must have hit your head,” Merlin said, reaching back out to him like he was actually going to check again. Arthur shoved his hands away but Merlin kept trying to grab at him. They tussled for a minute until Merlin nearly slipped himself and Arthur had to steady him.

“Okay, look, it's not like I was talking to it, that would be ridiculous,” and here Merlin forced out a laugh, not the beautiful one Arthur had heard earlier, this one was higher pitched and fake, he was literally saying the words _ha ha ha_ , “I was just talking at it. Seeing if I could get it to come closer. I didn't want to tell you because it's obviously embarrassing to be caught talking at something like an otter, or a fish, any animal, or even a tree because of course they can't talk back. Not that I've talked to a tree! Just out loud, to myself. To pass the time.” Merlin cut himself off and he certainly didn't look embarrassed, more nervous, but Arthur got distracted by how Merlin's shirt was a bit wet and clingy, likely from Arthur when they were shoving each other just now. His neckerchief was askew and he could see the wing of Merlin's collarbone with a little pocket of shadow caught in it.

“Fine,” he said, giving up entirely on this conversation because there was no point when Merlin was looking like that and rambling and how Arthur maybe liked it, only a little, and only because it made him feel like an actual person instead of a figurehead, a throne. He moved past Merlin to sit on the rock. “If you're going to be here, try not to be a nuisance.”

Merlin looked around, seeming to check for something, then sighed dramatically and sat down next to Arthur. He let his legs dangle in the water so Arthur did the same. Arthur leaned back on his hands only to jerk upright when his palms began stinging. In the adrenaline of the fall and Merlin's distracting nonsense after, he hadn't noticed he'd scraped both his hands against the creek bed. They were a bit muddy, with angry lines of red and bits of gravel.

The image of the double yolk streaked with red flashed through his mind and he felt dizzy for a moment.

“Here,” Merlin said, tugging on his wrists, holding both his hands palm up as he examined them. “Oh,” he breathed, “That's all.”

He looked disproportionately relieved. Then Merlin pulled on his wrists again until Arthur leaned forward. He let Merlin clean his palms in the creek, the water level high enough that their hands could dip below easily. Merlin was careful when picking out the gravel and the cold water numbed the sting away. It was nice to be touched like this, with care. Gaius was clinical. His knights treated woulds like the soldiers they were. It would be inappropriate for anyone else.

It was inappropriate for Merlin, but that had never stopped him. He shoved at Arthur playfully in the courtyard, jostled him absently with his elbow on a hunt, tackled him hard to the ground when an arrow whizzed overhead. He grabbed Arthur's shoulders with alarmingly strong fingers to try to force him out of bed too early on Sunday mornings saying rubbish like _the crown always has work to do._ He completely ignored any level of propriety when tying up Arthur's laces and getting him settled into his tunic and coat. He suited Arthur up for battle with a level of gravity and attention that always unnerved Arthur.

And then he did things like rest his hand on Arthur's forehead when Arthur had a fever and leave it there without Arthur needing to ask, or card his fingers through Arthur's hair to check for head wounds as he had today. More recently he had taken to settling into a chair by Arthur's fireplace and reading through endless pages of parchment and maps, checked things in books, doing what he called a “side project” that looked suspiciously like plans to get Mercia _and Essetir_ to double cede. He would swing his legs and occasionally tap his foot against Arthur's while Arthur sat in a chair next to him and just kind of drifted, tapping Merlin's foot back, slowing as he tired until their feet just rested against one another.

Merlin finished cleaning his palms and let go of his hands before leaning back to face the water. His eyes were half-lidded and he looked utterly content. It made Arthur's stomach flipflop and he lay back flat on the rock to stare at the clouds so he wouldn't have to look at Merlin.

“It's a nice day today, isn't it? Be a bit cooler tonight,” Merlin said, his voice low and approaching something akin to the pleasure Arthur had heard in his laugh earlier.

“Mm,” Arthur said drowsily, “it would be nicer if you were quiet,” which was the surest way to keep Merlin talking. He heard Merlin huff out an amused breath and then he did keep talking, about a new grain someone was trying to crossbreed and then about the farmland, then a black squirrel he'd seen in the forest that he'd followed all the way to the creek. His voice was as steady and warm as the air around them. He told Arthur stories about the otter he'd seen and the fish below, a badger he'd watched dig up roots, a fox that was too quick for him. Arthur closed his eyes and let himself drift, let Merlin's foot bump his in the water, let his ankle hook around Merlin's and let Merlin gently sway their legs together in the slow current.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I look at my writing and I think "is it overboard how much they touch one another?" and then I watch an episode and have to go in and add even more touching to make it canon compliant.


End file.
